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In one of this cute and funny Mac versus PC ads, which are sadly no longer being produced, the Mac personification, as portrayed by actor Justin Long, reminded the PC (as portrayed by John Hodgman), that there are over 100,000 Windows viruses, but not on the Mac.

Now this particular phrase became controversial, because you could take away different interpretations. Did he mean that the Mac simply didn’t have over 100,000 viruses, or that it had no viruses? If the latter, Apple’s ad agency was giving out erroneous information. Even though the number of Mac OS X viruses are small, there have been some, although there’s no evidence of any widespread outbreak.

At least not yet!

Therein lies the issue. The Mac OS X Public Beta came out over a decade ago. As the Mac platform has become more popular over the years, security experts, and representatives from security software companies, have reminded us again and again that serious malware outbreaks will come real soon now. Maybe so, but that largely depends on your definition of what “soon” really means.